Informative Advertising: A Better Way

Written by Paul Siegel

Advertisers have tried many approaches on Web. When one approach bombed, advertisers tried a new one. The latest is "contextual advertising." Sounds sophisticated. But it will die like all others. Why? Because none of these fanciful techniques take into account new online reality: The visitor is boss.

A new approach, Informative Advertising, does.

The Advertising Cemetery

Since inception of commercial Web, advertisers have been busy trying innumerable techniques. I look briefly at major ones:

1 - PUSH - Early in game they decided to send news together with advertising directly to Net user. Did not get off ground

2 - BANNERS - At first banners seemed to work. But after awhile they faded away. The cemetery is full of them.

3 - ANIMATION - You still see animation, though not as much as was prevalent at first. It will die soon

4 - FLASH - This seems to be time for Flash. But it is so irritating it will die soon too

5 - POP-UPS - You try to visit a site and up pops a window with an ad. Annoying. I don't give it much time to live

6 - POP-UNDERS - Instead of window popping up in front of window you want you see popped window afterwards. This too will die

The Latest Approach: Contextual Advertising

Now advertisers have gotten brilliant idea of grabbing visitor's attention while he or she is in a related situation. They say that if a person is at a search engine entering a keyword, this is a good place to advertise a product or service that fits under this keyword. This particular approach, it seems to me, is an excellent form of advertising. It has been done successfully by Google and other search engines. Some call this "contextual advertising." But I have a better name for it, as I will show below.

Here is an example of "contextual advertising." An outfit called EZula sells keywords. But instead of supplying a search engine EZula distributes a program called TOPtext. When a user of TOPtext visits a site, he sees highlighted words, which enable him to jump to sites that have purchased ads for these keywords.

These words are not highlighted by website owner. They are highlighted by TOPtext. The jumps take visitor, not to a site chosen by website owner, but to a competitor site. Do you think competitors will put up with this? More important, do you think visitor, when he finds out about this "contextual stealing," will trust advertiser for anything? This is most outrageous form of advertising invented so far.

Wells Fargo Bank, I hear, is one such "contextual advertiser." Does this increase your trust in Wells Fargo?

The Big Blunder

Six Basic and Simple Ad Tips

Written by Pamela Heywood

For something that is as important as life or death to your online business, I am utterly amazed by number of "bad ads" I read daily. Many people need guidance, especially when you are new to net, to advertising, to business ... For others, it never does any harm to go over some old ground. So here are some absolutely basic rules ips for writing email and online classifieds - to help you make them more effective.

1. Spell check!

This is so basic, it really should not need saying, but I can't believe number of simple typos and spelling errors I see - and they get published as they come, which is not going to give you a professional look nor solicit responses.

Write your ads in a calm moment, check them and check them again, then paste them into ad box. Don't type anywhere you place ads on spur of moment, because that way you are much more likely to make errors. Write yourself a note in an email to store your ad, then it will always be to hand.

And here's a handy guide for those 65 characters to line:

12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345

2. URLs

Always put http:// in front of web addresses. In some email programs www.yourdomain.com will not be "clickable" and people will not be able to respond easily. If they have to copy and paste URL into their browser rather than just hitting with mouse, do you reckon they will bother? I don't think so: no- body has time. Give 'em instant gratification, or they'll go elsewhere for it!

3. Email addresses

Likewise, in order to be "clickable" in all email programs, it is advisable to add mailto: at beginning of email addresses. Make it real easy for people to click and chances are, they will.

If you can fit both URL and email into your ads, great. Given a choice of either/or, I'd recommend you go for email. If you can keep people in "email mode" to subscribe, to get more information from an autoresponder, then your response rates will increase as well as giving you a better opportunity to get your message to them over and over again.

4. Write your ads in your own words

If your cloned ad reads exactly same as one next to it and a million others floating around Internet daily, you've just almost guaranteed that it will be lost, forgotten and ignored. You might have been told that it was "tried and tested", but that works only for original advertiser. After that, it's worn out, used, pre-owned!